Hulu Planning A “Hitman” TV Series

Fox 21 and Hulu are set to team for a television series based on the “Hitman” video game franchise with a pilot script to be penned by “John Wick” creator Derek Kolstad. Kolstad penned the first and is writing the upcoming third film in that series.

Here he will serve as executive producer on the series alongside franchise gatekeepers Adrian Askarieh and Chuck Gordon. The plan for now is for “Hitman” to become a flagship series on the streaming service.

The games center on Agent 47, a meticulous and lethal assassin with a mysterious backstory and the intention is to closely to the mythology of the games – whether it will stick to the most recent games’ tone and style is unclear.

Fox has attempted to adapt the property for film twice in the past decade, both times proved a disappointment and were slammed for completely missing the point of the games. The movies showed off big scale and self-serious action shootout sequences in generic locations as opposed to what the games are really all about – lavish international locales, quirky dark humour, stealth, deception and taking out targets in imaginative or clever ways.

The games have sold more than twenty-five million copies since being launched in 2000, with the most recent reboot of the franchise last year scoring both rave reviews and selling seven million copies.